Creating an XSLTProcessor

Specifying the stylesheet

Before you can use it, you must import a stylesheet with the importStylesheet() function. It has a single parameter, which is the DOM Node of the XSLT stylesheet to import.

註: The import is live, meaning that if you alter the stylesheet DOM after importing it, this will be reflected in the processing. Rather than modifying the DOM it is recommended to use stylesheet parameters which are usually easier and can give better performance.

var testTransform = document.implementation.createDocument("", "test", null);
// just an example to get a transform into a script as a DOM
// XMLDocument.load is asynchronous, so all processing happens in the
// onload handler
testTransform.addEventListener("load", onload, false);
testTransform.load("test-transform.xml");
function onload() {
processor.importStylesheet(testTransform);
}

importStylesheet requires one argument, a DOM Node. If that node is a document node, you can pass in a full XSL Transform or a literal result element transform, otherwise it must be an xsl:stylesheet or xsl:transform element.

text -XMLDocument with a single root element <transformiix:result> with the text as a child

transformToFragment

You can also use transformToFragment() which will return a DOM DocumentFragment node. This is handy because appending a fragment to another node transparently appends all the children of that fragment, and the fragment itself is not merged. Fragments are therefore useful for moving nodes around and storing them without the overhead of a full document object.

transformToFragment() takes two arguments: the source document to be transformed (as above) and the Document object that will own the fragment (all fragments must be owned by a document).

transformToFragment will only produce HTML DOM objects if the owner document is itself an HTMLDocument, or if the output method of the stylesheet is HTML. It will not produce an HTML DOM objects if only the toplevel element of the result is <html> as transformToFragment is rarely used to create this element. If you want to override this, you can set the output method normally in the standard way.

transforming HTML

Unfortunately it is currently not supported to transform HTML nodes using XSLT. Some things work if you use lower case node-names in patterns and expressions, and treat the nodes as if they are in the null namespace, however this is not very well tested so it might not work in all situations. It is also possible that this will change in a future release.

Resetting

The XSLTProcessor object also implements a reset() method, which can be used to remove all stylesheets and parameters then put the processor back into its initial state. This method is implemented in Mozilla 1.3 and later.